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Since the early hours of the morning, Ball State students stopping by Woodworth have been met with a peculiar sight as they try to pay for their meals: a professional woodcarver meticulously engraving to-scale replicas of student IDs and payment cards into a massive wooden slab.
With the campus-wide dining system outage still wreaking havoc at the time of publication, most dining halls have reverted to the basics—pen, paper, and iPhone calculators—to tally up students’ meal costs. But Woodworth Dining has taken a more...hands-on approach.
"We just wanted to prevent fraud," a Woodworth Dining manager told BSnUws, who watched proudly as the woodcarver, chisel in hand, painstakingly etched a replica of a Ball State student’s ID card into a plank of wood. "You can't trust these high-tech methods when the system’s down, but wood? Wood is forever."
The woodcarver, a local artisan typically known for crafting intricate wooden sculptures, has been contracted at the last minute to ensure that each student's cards, details and all, are accurately engraved onto the wooden slab. The slab, now covered in numerous replicas of these documents, is being used to verify students' identities and charges—one chisel stroke at a time. Once the system goes back online, the University will process each card manually.
The result? An agonizingly slow process that has left students standing in line for upwards of 30 minutes—if they’re lucky.
"This is ridiculous," complained one student who had been waiting for nearly an hour just to get lunch. "It’s 2024, and I’m watching someone carve my ID into wood like 'the good old days'. All I got was a side of mac!"
The woodcarving process, while intended to secure students’ accounts, has done little to reassure those concerned about their information being chiseled into a giant slab for all to see. "I’m not sure how secure this is," said another frustrated student. "Isn’t this just a big, public record of my credit card details? What happens if someone decides to snap a picture of it?"
A BSnUws correspondent tried paying at Woodworth to see what all the fuss was about. Within just 5 minutes of the corporate AMEX carved into the wood, the card has received an attempted charge from an adult streaming service. The card has since been cancelled.
As the dining system outage continues, the now-infamous Woodworth wooden slab grows ever more crowded with student IDs and payment cards, each chiseled with painstaking precision. Whether this woodcarving method will be lauded as a brilliant stroke of fraud prevention or remembered as a bizarre overreaction remains to be seen. For now, students can only speculate about the long-term security of their wooden replicas.
Only time will tell.